Comments on: What It Feels Like

By: Austin

Austin — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 05:45:44 +0000

Well I have always though of my self as the different kid out of the bunch. Witch I my hole life since I was 2 is when I was digonsed as a diabetic. I was in a coma for 3 days. But what I’m getting at is it never gets easy. Each day is a fight. Its so hard living with diabetes. Everyone points you out as that kid is a diabetic and when they get mad at you they will make fun of you for it. Not one day of my life has been easy. I want to be normal but it never will be/.

By: Shannon

Shannon — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:19:41 +0000

I’ve been diabetic for almost my eniter life, and its the most emotional roller coaster i have ever been on. I was diagnosed at a fairly young age, for most of my life i haven’t known what its like to be “normal” when i was 9 years old i went to a camp, called camp banting and it changed my outlook on life, i was soo young and i didnt realize there was other people like me, what did i know.
i’d have to say that yesterday changed my life for ever, im 16 years old and i was told if i dont start taking care of myself i will die. But , everytime i get my a1c checked nobody understands you know? nobody gets that its the hardships of diabetes that make me hate it. But it also has its pro’s
gettting outta class, i mean i gotta say thats a good one
but i think what makes me most perturbed is the face that type 1 is differnet that type 2. No im not fat, no i dont have type two, i have to say that too everyone, i mean i mine as well write ” IM A TYPE 1 DIABETIC” people still wouldnt get it thgouh.

By: kimm covault

kimm covault — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:07:06 +0000

My A1 was 6.8. How do you bring it down. Thanks Kimm

By: leigh1

leigh1 — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 04:14:56 +0000

Hi Amy,

Your words echo how I feel about diabetes, and I’ve had it going on 37 years. You wrote so eloquently! For me, it has been a difficult disease to control; I have numerous complications. It is bad enough for me to deal with it; a random blood sugar revealed a grandchild has it too. I am so angry!

By: sugarybibs

sugarybibs — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 22:49:24 +0000

To amy T i agree with you i have had type 1 diabetes since i was 16 years of age i am now in my fifties and even my own family say you must have ate sugar etc!!etc!!you must have been fat!!!well i was always very slim when i was a kid never ate hardly any sweets or a bad diet was very fit and sporty and i was the only only one out of a family of five kids me ma and da and i was the unlucky one.It really annoys me when the television shows big fat old people getting diabetes but its not the same as junevile onset type one diabetes and they should be sued!!!type 2 is completly different!!!!ours is not our fault!!!

By: Lauren

Lauren — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:12:51 +0000

The hardest part for me is dealing with people who know nothing about the disease, and dealing with people who SHOULD know, but don’t. I checked my BG twice during a lecture, and my classmate said, “Don’t you just have to check 4 times a day? That’s what our book says.” I’ve had doctors tell me I am “obsessive” for checking 10-15 times a day, even though that is why my A1c is near-perfect.

The reality is that type 1 diabetics live on a knife edge. We are much, much more vulnerable than the average person with normal insulin production. I am not saying we shouldn’t be surgeons and Olympic athletes–we should. But, if I caught a nasty strain of the flu, even being generally healthy as I am, I could wind up in the hospital for days. Even being super-stressed can result in high numbers on my meter and all the horrible things that go with stubborn high BG–dry mouth, headache, feeling out of it.

Very few people understand that while I am a healthy, active person, I only have a small margin of error in terms of my health. Little health blips –a virus, mild food poisoning, even a bad headache or injury that leads to stress hormone production — mean BIG consequences for diabetics.

Lastly, I am sick to death of the lack of distinction made between type 1 and type 2 diabetes. It’s beyond ridiculous! Type 1 needs a new name. I have been insulted by nurses and other people who should know better telling me that maybe if I ate healthier I could “get off insulin.” The plethora of ignorant and insensitive comments I’ve heard– MANY FROM PEOPLE WITHIN THE MEDICAL FIELD — could fill volumes. I’ve heard some bona fide scary stuff from “diabetes educators,” too.

There is a severe shortage of people who “get it.”

I hate the word cure, but can we please get an islet transplant protocol cooking??? I am done with this stupid disease.

By: AmyT

AmyT — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:04:57 +0000

Wow, Alex, I’m glad it’s not so hard for you.

Sharing feelings is not meant to be self-pity necessarily; the whole point is that having an online community means you can vent a little about how hard diabetes can be among people who “get it.” So please don’t lash out over that.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:34:09 +0000

Oooh, your blog just makes me mad sometimes when you treat diabetes like such a huge trial and tribulation! Am I freak because diabetes never seemed that difficult to me?

Granted, you’re probably in better control than me with the constant diet policing and the use of a pump, but I’ve been a type 1 diabetic for over 20 years with decent control and it has never been that big of a deal. As long as my blood glucose isn’t drastically low I don’t have crazy mood swings, as long as I am carb counting and taking the appropriate amount of insulin to match I stay in relatively good control, even without much of the exercise that I know I should have more of diabetes doesn’t effect my life that much. I have the small annoyance of my routine shots before meals and that’s about it.

Sorry to lash out a bit. I do enjoy your blog content for the tips and reviews of equipment, but a lot of the poor diabetic me talk does get on my nerves.

By: misha

misha — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 02:32:27 +0000

I don’t technically have diabetes at this point but I’m pretty sure it is lurking in my future. I believe that I am at risk for it although my doctor thinks I’m just crazy. She says I worry about nothing, and basically rolls her eyes about my concerns whenever I mention it.

This issue started for me about a year ago when I was 30 lb. heavier than I am now (BMI was 25 before and it’s about 20 now). I spent a week with my mother and she let me test my fasting blood sugar with her machine every morning when she was doing hers. It was just a whim, I thought it was “fun” to test. I was surprised to find that most mornings my readings were actually higher than hers. I got readings of 6.7, 6.5, 6.4, 6.8, 6.3 etc. Not a single reading below 6 but no readings above 7 either, so according to my doctor it’s no big deal, I don’t have diabetes.

Because I was concerned all the same, I tried out a low-carb diet for eight months and lost 30 lb. I now regularly have blood sugars averaging 5.2 to 5.7 (I got my own home machine for testing since the pharmacy said I didn’t need a doctor’s prescription). My doctor still thinks I’m being ridiculous, said I wasn’t that fat before I lost weight.

My doctor wouldn’t schedule me for a glucose tolerance test because she said I don’t need one. So I volunteered for a research study on predicting diabetes on the basis of dietary questionnaires just so I could get a glucose tolerance test done. Results were even more frustrating. I apparently have perfectly normal blood glucose two hours after a 75g dose of glucose (but I tested with my own machine at the one-hour mark and it was 14.6…that cannot be good, even if it did drop back to 5.6 at the two-hour mark). My doctor said that these home tests aren’t all that accurate and besides, it’s only the two hour reading that matters.

Sigh…I would rather actually have a diagnosis than this “non-diagnosis” that I am pretty sure is a harbinger of future problems. I almost wish I could have just one fasting glucose test (at the lab) to come out higher than 7 so my doctor would take my concerns seriously. Apparently that is what it would take for her to think I’m not crazy.

By the way, I love this website, I hope you don’t mind having officially non-diabetic visitors dropping in

By: Rosalind Joffe

Rosalind Joffe — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:00:01 +0000

Reading your blog and those of other D-bloggers, I’ve come to realize that diabetes is SO different from the other invisible illnesses just because you really can see cause and effect even if you can’t always “control” it. After 30 years of living with invisible chronic illness (MS and ulcerative colitis), I still get ticked off when “healthy” people seem to “blame” a sick person for not doing more or a better job of getting better. If there’s one thing I have learned over all these years (and in my late 50′s I’m healthier than ever) it’s that it’s all about how we view this. The illness is something that happens to us, just like much of the crap that life dishes out. But we do have control over how we view it and what we do with our feelings about it. But it’s not a static road – things change, we change. Keep working on it, Amy. You’re doing a tremendous service to yourself, your kids and all who read your work.